She reached out a finger, trailed it across the familiar face of Elena on one of the big pictures she kept on the wall close to her bed. Elena had been so photogenic. So easy to body-paint, so easy to turn into something special, and it would just be that much harder to find a replacement for her.
Cayce thought about Stefan and all that weirdness with him calling her via the sound waves or whatever to speak to her and Richard, wondering just how weird it really was. Something was incredibly odd and unique about Stefan too. But it was more than that. His unique gift or ability, or whatever the hell that was, made that telecommunication happen. And the fact that he knew about the way she dealt with energy and how he knew that the luminescence found in her art was made by blending her energy with that of her subject, the model, and why Cayce couldn’t ever make Naomi be Elena, no matter how much Naomi wanted to become the next Elena, because something was really wrong about Naomi’s energy.
As far as Cayce was concerned, she dealt with people who were full of love and light, people who wanted to do good and be good—not people who were full of bitchy, cranky miserableness and who wanted to step on others in order to move up because that was just so wrong.
Cayce could do so many things with the right person, but she was seriously crippled when she had to deal with the wrong person. And, after yesterday, she knew that she was done with Naomi.
She picked up the phone and called Anita. “I’m just now waking up. I know I’m late, but can you make sure Naomi is no longer on any of my schedules?”
“Let me check,” Anita said. “Did something happen?”
“Nothing more than usual,” she said. “I just can’t deal with that woman anymore.”
“I’m surprised you ever could,” she said. “She’s brutal.”
“I know, but some things just—”
“I know. You can’t do it. Okay, she’s booked for one more next week.”
“Have we paid her, or is it a contract that we have to honor?”
“No, we haven’t, and, no, it isn’t,” she said. “I can cancel it.”
“Please do. We won’t be using her again.”
“Good,” Anita said. “She’s nasty and greedy, isn’t she?”
“She is at that, and that’s the nice way to say it,” she said. “Anyway, I’ll be in soon.”
“Okay, I’ll see you in a bit.”
Cayce got up and headed in to take a shower. Just standing under the hot water, getting the dried paint all off, the little bit that she had missed getting off last night, wouldn’t be enough. She obviously needed a good scrubbing to get herself clean of the toxins used to remove the paint initially. This time she did a full-on scrub with the intent to soothe and to ease her skin, instead of last night’s hard scrubbing, when she had been too impatient and too tired to do anything else.
As soon as her shower stopped dripping, she put a one-minute conditioner on her hair and let it soak in, then gave it a quick rinse before wrapping it up in a towel. She stepped out of the shower and into the bathroom and coated her body in moisturizer. One of the handicaps of being a full-time artist was dealing with elements that stripped her skin of its natural moisturizers. And that was something she had to watch out for.
When she was done, she walked back to her bedroom, pulled out white capris, some little flat shoes, and an elegant long tunic top. It was simple cotton but made her feel good and look good too.
Downstairs she put on coffee and rustled up some eggs and toast for her breakfast. The one thing that Richard was right about was how she wasn’t taking care of herself. She had allowed her work schedule to interfere.
Before Elena’s death, Cayce’s lack of self-care had been a problem; now, after her best friend’s murder, Cayce had mentally compensated, trying to put that soul-deep loss in the right perspective, and she had again just let her own self-care slide.
While she ate, she made a simple list of things she had to do, and on top of that list was to move some of these potential artist models forward. She really wanted to find somebody she could connect with. Not necessarily as well as Elena—that wasn’t realistic—but someone who was unique and fresh, different, with some sort of connection between Cayce and the new model.
Cayce would have to use her energy in a different way today. Something that she used to do all the time after being put in the hospital by a boyfriend—make that fiancé—where she had mentally corrected because she had this problem with distancing. She always tried to distance to the point that she didn’t even acknowledge what the relationship originally was. He was her fiancé, the man who she would marry and spend the rest of her life with. Until he got mad because she chose to go to an art show instead of spend time with him. The end result was that she spent time in the hospital.
Elena had moved Cayce out of the very difficult situation she’d been in and had helped her set up her life again. She had been consoled by the fact that somebody had threatened her fiancé to disappear quietly—or else.
She would be forever grateful to that person. She didn’t know if that person was still around because of Elena, who had a lot of those kind of people as friends, whereas Cayce just had Elena, making Cayce’s loss all that much more heartbreaking.
With Cayce’s to-do list well and truly locked in, she nodded, realizing that this failure to take care of herself was causing all kinds of chaos in her world. I’ll do better now, she
